The Entrepreneurial Society

Continental Europe is set up to preserve large public sectors, large banks, and large corporations. For individuals, the promise is stable jobs, a stable business environment, and collective sharing of the costs of unemployment, retirement, and health care. For the economy as a whole, however, the result is stagnation, inefficiency, and a burden on the working population to support the unproductive sector that is becoming increasingly unsustainable.

Over time, Europeans with entrepreneurial inclinations will be increasingly tempted to emigrate to the United States or other countries in the Anglosphere. Among the remaining Europeans, political support for welfare-state policies will solidify, even as the economic viability of those policies slips further.

The essay takes off from a new book by Carl Schramm, called The Entrepreneurial Imperative.

European industries seem to have higher entry costs, and with them lower turnover rates: 50% of new pharmaceutical products in America come from firms less than ten years old, against only 10% in Europe; 12% of the biggest US firms by market cap at the end of the 1990s were less than 20 years old, against 4% of the biggest European firms.

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